Shelley Duvall's marriage is having difficulties in "The Shining." PHOTO BY WARNER BROS.

What if we told you that director Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror classic "The Shining" is NOT just a movie about a writer played by Jack Nicholson who goes insane after taking a job as a caretaker at an isolated resort hotel?

Would you believe that it is a film that contains hundreds of subliminal images and secret messages? Would you buy the notion that the movie is really about Nazis, ancient American Indian burial grounds and the devil? Would it surprise you to learn that the film is a cleverly disguised admission by Kubrick that he helped the federal government fake the Apollo moon landing?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, or are at least intrigued by the questions, we've got a film for you – and it's not "The Shining."

"Room 237" is a documentary mixing fact and fantasy that is director Rodney Ascher's loving salute to a film that scared him so much when he was a child that he ran screaming out of the theater after only 10 minutes.

His filmmaking partner, producer Tim Kirk, sheepishly acknowledges that "The Shining" still gives him the creeps after hundreds of viewings.

According to the filmmakers, the horror film has developed a determined and imaginative cult following in the three decades since its theatrical release, and they have given five of the most passionate and articulate of those followers a chance to put all their theories into one intriguing film. Among those offering their opinions on Kubrick's film are ABC news correspondent Bill Blakemore, college professor Geoffrey Cocks, playwright Juli Kearns, conspiracy theorist and author Jay Weidner and Kubrick blogger John Fell Ryan.

"Room 237," which opens Friday at the South Coast Village theaters, was shown last year at both the Cannes and Sundance film festivals. We sat down with Ascher and Kirk to find out if they're crazy.

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER:What is the genesis of this project?

TIM KIRK: The Internet.

OCR:Seriously?

TK: I'm always been interested in "The Shining," so if I see something on the Internet, I'll usually read it. In this case, it was Jay Weidner's essay laying out some of his ideas about Kubrick faking the moon landing, and "The Shining" being his coded confession. I shared it with Rodney and the next thing we knew, we were looking for more of these theories.

RODNEY ASCHER: The substance of these theories is really deep and fascinating and eerie, but what was really fascinating was this phenomenon that there are so many people poring over "The Shining" in incredible detail looking for symbolic readings and metaphors. I always loved Kubrick and "The Shining." I once did a fake movie trivia slide show that was nothing but decoding the numerology of "The Shining."

OCR:So you're one of the crazies?

RA: (laughs) Of course I am. I'm the kind of guy who is happy to watch "The Shining" a frame at a time forward and backward for two years. Anybody who watches this film is one. If you can spend 104 minutes watching nothing but symbolic interpretations of "The Shining," you're one.

OCR:And I take it you believe that you two are not alone?

RA: It seemed like a daunting challenge to make a movie like this for the general public, but here we are doing an interview in the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles about a movie that is inexplicably going to play in real movie theaters for normal human beings.

OCR:Could each of you tell us when you saw "The Shining" for the first time?

TK: I saw it when I was 15. I wasn't old enough, but I snuck in with a friend who looked older.

RA: I was about 11 or 12 when I first saw it, and it scared the hell out of me. I only made it 10 minutes in the movie.

OCR:You were that scared?

RA: Absolutely. It was scary, but I was as embarrassed back then as I am now to admit it (laughs). I revisited it years later on video.

OCR: Were you scared the second time?

RA: Parts of it. And parts of it I found funny. I think some of the intimidation in the beginning is the music. It just cuts through you like a knife.

OCR:Tim, how long before you saw it a second time?

TK: In college. Then I started watching it repeatedly on television.

OCR: I'm not passing judgment on the people you feature in your film, but were you ever tempted to laugh at these people?

TK: We weren't making a spoof, so I was never tempted to laugh. I would read these theories alone at 2 or 3 in the morning and it would make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

RA: And that actually helped us make "Room 237" a horror film in its own right. We wanted to sell an eerie quality to the film.

OCR:Did working on this project change how you felt about "The Shining?"

TK: Rodney and I hadn't watched "The Shining" for a couple of years after we started this project. We had been doing research but hadn't started the interviews. Then we sat down and watched "The Shining," and saw it completely different than before. In the ensuing years, both of us had become fathers, and suddenly we watched the movie and saw it for the first time as a cautionary tale about fatherhood, and letting your work overtake your life. That pretty much haunted my dreams while we were making this film. When you see this movie as a child, you identify with Danny (the boy on the bike). But as an adult, you identify with Jack's character and it changes everything.

OCR:Do you accept that there are people, including many film critics, who do not believe that "The Shining" is one of Kubrick's better films?

RA: We do.

OCR:Do you have to sell those people on "The Shining" before you try to sell them on "Room 237?"

TK: For "Room 237" to work, we have to present "The Shining" as a masterpiece.

RA: Some people are going to believe, and some people are not going to believe, but we had to believe.

OCR: Did you reject any theories as being too far-out?

RA: To try to get everything in would have been impossible.

TK: At one point we considered including every theory, and I have a crazy spreadsheet that shows me going insane trying to characterize every one, but at some point, the ones we did use just stood out as more engaging.

RA: There were some that we didn't understand, or weren't that different than other theories we already had, and then there were some people we simply couldn't track down. There were some that were baffling to us.

OCR:You talk about the fake moon landing very matter-of-factly, but that's a pretty outrageous theory. So is the Holocaust stuff. Don't you think that some people are going to think this is crazy?

TK: The point of "Room 237" is that "The Shining" is seen differently by different people. If people look at "Room 237" differently, who are we to take offense?

OCR:Who is the audience for this film?

RA: You've got me. I'm astonished that anybody who's not exactly like me can sit through this movie. Happily enough, it seems to be getting to a wider audience. It's had an amazing film festival run. I went to a neighborhood screening with regular people who are not devoted to "The Shining" and they seemed to enjoy it. It was an early indicator to me that this film might be able to reach other kinds of people. Tim and I were hoping that this film would spark conversations on a variety of subjects, and it seems to be doing that.

OCR:Is Stanley Kubrick on the record anywhere discussing any of these theories?

TK: Not really.

OCR: Do you believe that he intended all this symbolism?

RA: I believe that there is a lot of symbolism in "The Shining." If you look at an early film of his called "Fear and Desire," he cast the same actors for the Americans and the Nazis. It seems there is some interesting and complicated symbolism going on. In "Full Metal Jacket," if you look at the hold the sniper's shooting out of, it is shaped like the state of Texas. There are a lot of weird references to Texas in that film, and I don't think that's a coincidence, given the Texas history with snipers. That's the kind of detail we're talking about in "The Shining." Kubrick is a symbolic filmmaker. I don't think there is any doubt about that. It can't all be an accident.

TK: Ultimately, this is a film about what happens to a work of art when it leaves the artist's hands. Who owns it? What do other people make of it? What's important to them?

RA: Although we're talking about "The Shining," we're hoping that this film starts conversations about things other than "The Shining." Art and intent is something that interests us, and I think it interests other people as well. Some people believe that what he meant is important, but it's not the end of the line.

OCR:Do you think it's proper for one filmmaker to make a movie about the symbolism of another filmmaker?

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